Nvidia GTX1080 Founders Edition Review

Temperatures and Power Draw

With the GPU Boost ensuring that you're always pushing towards the thermal limits it is no great surprise to find that all of the nVidia reference cards end up with about the same load temperature. The GTX 1080 is, however, the lowest of the various flagship models.

Power Draw

All that effort into getting the Pascal GPU to be power efficient has certainly paid off. Equal to an overclocked GTX 970. Incredible.

I'm comparing the 1080 scores with the (better) OC 980ti's and there are hardly any difference at all.

Looking at 2560x1440 resolution, the difference in Bioshock is 3 (three!) FPS and in Tomb Raider it is 6 (six!). As the numbers are in the >100 range we are talking a few percentage points difference. Less than 5% improvement.

To me, that means the 1080 'FE' is identical in performance to the best aftermarket version of the 980ti.

Or am I missing something?

PS: I'm *SO* looking forward to see what the chip can do with a bit more power and a bit more cooling!Quote

I'm comparing the 1080 scores with the (better) OC 980ti's and there are hardly any difference at all.

Looking at 2560x1440 resolution, the difference in Bioshock is 3 (three!) FPS and in Tomb Raider it is 6 (six!). As the numbers are in the >100 range we are talking a few percentage points difference. Less than 5% improvement.

To me, that means the 1080 'FE' is identical in performance to the best aftermarket version of the 980ti.

Or am I missing something?

PS: I'm *SO* looking forward to see what the chip can do with a bit more power and a bit more cooling!

I can't remember whether Tom ever mentioned it in his early review, but that 980ti overclocked card he had absolutely denominated any other overclocked 980ti I'd ever seen. Like, I don't know how it was that powerful. It must have been in the top 5% of overclockers, not just reaching really high frequencies but actually scaling in equal measure. Maxwell cards scaled oddlythey didn't always scale equally. One 980ti at 1500/8000Mhz could be vastly different than another 980ti at the same clocks. Some of that was due to the annoying nature of GPU Boost 2.0 and the card throttling, but I found throttling by the normal 13Mhz every now and again did not amount to the kind of variances we are seeing here. Tom's 980ti was ridiculously powerful, far more than any other 980ti I'd seen reviewed. Maybe a Kingpin or HOF on water hit those numbers, but not that I've seen. To emphasis that point, check out Tomb Raiderthe ASUS 980 SLI setup is equal to his 980ti OC card. That's ridiculous and no other review I've seen shows anywhere near that kind of performance from a single 980ti. Also, Tom's AMD Fury performance numbers were always behind what others were getting, including myself. This shows how a particular driver and card can vary widely. Something was at play there that caused such vastly different results.Quote

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